Today’s post is a variety featuring three guest articles.

i) Every writer experiences this: that sometimes awkward situation when a person calls you up to ask whether you were writing about them. Of course that answer is generally No. People often underestimate the patterns in life and everyday interactions. There are usually more people that share our idiosyncrasies and quirks than we realize, and this becomes especially relevant with the second guest post where an article talks about a quirk I would have thought was only peculiar to me.

It is also not uncommon, even in routine contact, for people to wonder or read more targeted meaning into a conversation than the author intends – regardless of how explicitly the message is written. This isn’t necessarily negative, at least not unless the erroneous interpretation is projected back on the author as their original motive with the message. Eventually, an important understanding of communication is that people mostly read themselves into a message – irrespective of what the author really intends. As my writing mentor, Dr. Haimes-Korn, would admonish: this is what enriches conversations because an author can appreciate their work not only from their interpretation of it, but also from the interpretation of their audience, which is usually independent of the author’s original meaning.

Whichever the case, I enjoyed this guest post because it obviously engaged both my understanding of writing and my experience as a writer and speaker.

Aiming Blog Posts

I got a note yesterday from a CEO I work with asking if a specific blog post was aimed at him. I replied and told him that… continue reading »

ii) Misdelivering messages is probably one of my most notorious quirks. I often joke that I’d never get away with a secret affair because sooner or later my messages will wind up in the wrong inbox. Only a few people on my contact list can say to have never received an unintended message from me that was meant for another person. There are several factors that all contribute to this quirkiness: an extensive dependence on or fiddling with technological features, attempts to multitask, deliberate absentmindedness / unseriousness [which I happen to have a PhD on], and perhaps the fact that none of those wrong deliveries have affected my relationship with the individuals in a cataclysmic way. If discovered, I simply send an acknowledgment retracting the message from the wrong recipient, and then I move on. I have erroneously delivered praises, rants, and routine messages of just about every kind [even worse is when dealing with a distribution list where several contacts continue to receive messages they weren’t signed up to get]. Of course this is typically easy to correct when you live life lightly, but the notion is what made this second guest post relevant to me. I owe more awkwardness to Auto-Fill than I can possibly admit.

The Perils of Email Auto-Fill

Every new technology is amazing, and every new technology brings its own horrors. For example, there was no such thing as waking up at 30,000 feet on the shoulder of a stranger who is covered in your drool until we invented commercial air flight (and Ambien).

And so it is with one small email “feature” that we cannot do without, yet has cost almost everyone who has ever texted or emailed a moment of… continue reading »

iii) Last, but not least, is this article about Another Chance. An especially personal mantra on living and handling life is the saying that ‘Everyday is a new day‘. That saying echos very strongly with me, and how I conduct life; as does this final guest post.

Another Chance to Start Over

Every day that you begin with a colleague, a partner, a customer… it might as well be a fresh start. There’s little upside in two strikes, a grudge, probation. When we give people the… continue reading »

I hope you enjoy reading the guest posts. The week is young, make it good.

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